Theory of the Multiverse
by Fiercest
Summary: 20 themes for different !verses. Chapter 2: Pirates.
1. Roommates

Title: If We Were a Sitcom  
>Universe: <span>Sakura, Sasuke and Naruto are roommates.  
>Summary:<span> Sakura finds a flyer then finds herself sharing a bathroom with two men.  
>An: I think I'll do a bunch of these with different !verses. Woo. PS: If you like this there's a longer, narrative version of this which is actually much better titled 'Roommates'.

_the power of the star_

When Sasuke was little, his older brother handed him a plastic telescope. It wasn't much of anything really, just cobbled together scraps of an 8th grade science project. But Sasuke cherished it, found the stars through the glass and pretended the future.

_two is a crowd_

When Naruto was six, he made his first friend. He was older, and so by playground law, was the boss. He didn't like playing knights and dragons or cowboys and Indians or goodguy/badguy. He didn't like to pretend. Naruto did. One day he didn't toss the ball back. He set it at his feet and went off to pretend that the jungle gym was a fortress all by himself.

_And the girl in the corner that no one ignores_

Sakura, even in her younger days, had been easy to spot in a crowd. She didn't like this much because the attention wasn't exactly 'positive'. Her childhood wasn't a tragedy, but still she wished she could have been a little more invisible. Until high school that is, when everything seemed to flip on its head and no one ever spared her a second glance.

_a match made in hell _

The problem with having friends, Sasuke and Naruto soon discover is that some people aren't very good at it. They meet like this: Sasuke has a friend who knows someone and Naruto has a friend who knows someone and as it turns out everyone in the world thinks they're gay. A blind date has never been more awkward.

_the whole war_

Eventually their brief truce over the salad course is broken when Naruto decides that it's freaking him _the fuck out_ that Sasuke's face hasn't moved at all the whole meal. "TERMINATOR!" He shouts then tosses water in his face. Sasuke is not pleased in the slightest.

_questionable_

Their university, as it turns out does in fact have a head honcho. And it is possible to be sent to his office. Naruto thought he'd outgrown this, Sasuke was appalled that his perfect record was tarnished. They never do find out why they weren't in deeper trouble (they'd really stepped in it with their plans of vengeance), but Sasuke has his suspicions. Itachi gets a very big birthday present that year. And his card has handwritten words on it.

_inevitability_

Med school is over before she can blink and she's the youngest in her class. She came in first and she is really proud of it. Her aunt Tsunade brags about it to everyone she meets. Sometimes though, she wished that it hadn't been a given since day one. She sometimes wished that someone could have believed that there would be something in her life that she was good at besides homework.

_farewell is for the sake of tomorrow _

She had a friend once. The year she was sent to live with Tsunade, her aunt sent her to summer camp to try and make her feel normal. Clearly she didn't understand that after everything she'd lived through that wasn't going to happen but because her heart was in the right place, Sakura went anyway. When she said goodbye to Ino, her heart broke a little and it may have done more harm than good. Because at 14 years old, Sakura was given a taste of something she wouldn't have again. Not for another decade.

_desperate situation _

Depending on who you ask, she didn't need to find them. Her life wasn't hanging in the balance. Her happiness didn't hinge on meeting them. It didn't start out that way anyway. Finding them, she never tells them, was like being starving and then having your first bite of cake or steak or an apple; nothing in the world is worth sacrificing that one bite. In her case, she got two.__

_butterflies and hurricanes_

Finding that flyer on the messageboard at the hospital changed everything.

_Roommate wanted.__  
><em>No smoking, no pets and no music from artists under the age of 20.  
>Individual bedrooms, shared bathroom, kitchen and living room.<br>To submit application, contact the landlord, Kakashi Hatake: 657-4367

_everything it seems I like's a little bit stronger/ a little bit thicker/ a little bit harmful for me _

"I'm just concerned," Tsunade says in that way she has when she's not going to take no for an answer. "Don't be," Sakura says in that way that she does when she knows that she's not going to get what she wants. "You're rooming with someone with multiple arrests." "So? It's silly, petty stuff. Besides, there's also Sasuke." "Him, I just don't like."

_her knights in dinky armor_

There is a rat in the bathroom. She vowed from then on that there would be no more ramen parties in the bathtub. But first, she had priorities higher on her list. "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!" She shrieked at the top of her lungs and pulled the towel around her. She ran into the living room, soaking wet and disheveled. Sasuke looked up, Naruto looked down. "RAT. KILL IT. KILL IT NOW."

_Only a mighty sadness fills/ The spaces of the dark_

When she starts to forget things about her parents, Tsunade gives her an old video that she likes to look at; of a young man and woman trading the camera back and forth, including a beaming infant in the shot every second of the film.

One night she comes home from her shift to find Sasuke staring at the reel, as engrossed as she's ever seen him in schematics for satellites.

She closes the door, he looks up and their eyes meet. He smiles a little and she runs to him. Her arms wind around his neck and squeeze tight. He strokes her hair, clutches her back and lets her cry.

_if we cannot see_

"Goddamit Sakura-!" "No you cannot have your glasses back. They're cuter on me."__

_that stupid four-eyes_

"SHUT UP FOUR-EYES." "YOU'RE STILL WEARING MY GLASSES."  
><em><br>three heavenly kings_

Is the name of the novel based on their lives. Naruto weaves a tale about two kings who ruled over the land. Though their friendship was strong, tension ran high and there was always the vague threat of war. Until a third king arrived, she demanded to be called such despite her gender and claimed no territory but merely wanted a title and a home. She found it.

It sucked actually and he never got past page 12. He couldn't figure out how to capture the magic of their family. He couldn't bear the thought of not doing it justice.

_dirty little secrets and white lies_

World of Warcraft is possibly the worst kept secret in the SasuSakuNaru household. Sasuke tends to yell at the screen.

Although, neither Sasuke nor Sakura has figured out yet that Naruto is _FrogSageNin_, the sage who's been stalking and pwning him for the past three weeks everywhere he goes.  
><em><br>the point between life and death_

In…out…in…out…

"Sasuke? Honey, I am so sorry. I didn't mean to! I am so so so so sooooo _sorry. _The fuse blew. It's just s game anyway, I mean-!"

"Just…a…game?"

"Well, I mean World of Warcraft really is just a-" she cut herself off when she saw his expression darken more. "No. No it is not, you must of heard me wrong."__

_You woke the beast!_

Naruto and Sakura had pushed the couch over onto its back and hid behind it like a foxhole. "What did you do?"Naruto hissed to his sister-in-arms.

"I did a very bad thing," she replied, shell-shocked.  
><em><br>_Naruto patted her arm comfortingly. She was new meat. He was a veteran to Sasuke's temper.

_what a lady really wants_

She wants a bath, sleep, food and sex. In that order. Her shift was long. Very long. Sasuke has other plans. He adds massage to the list.

And zombie-killing.

_not just a dumb blondie_

Naruto realizes before they do.

_love can change any pessimist_

"Will you marry me?"

_I don't think now is the best time_

"OW MY EYES! I HATE YOU, YOU BOTH SUCK!"

A/N: Long version on my profile under 'Roommates'.


	2. Pirates

The Canons Call

**Verse**: Pirates

_All the gates of love you won't walk through_

No one ever talks about life before One Upon a Time. No one tells you that before they were what they became, they were just two filthy children, living side by side under roofs with holes, that before he was ten he was apprenticed to a blacksmith and before she was thirteen she was serving ale by the tub and shoving back hands that roved.

He left before their story started and didn't say a word. He didn't want to love her and so left the gates around their city behind in the dust of the trail.

_There's frost on the window, no bread on the shelf._

There was a knock late at night on the door of the forge. No one answered but the door was unlocked. Inside it was dark, no one was there. He wasn't at home, the tavern or the blacksmiths. She was freezing, hungry and she couldn't find Sasuke anywhere.

That winter was the hardest she'd ever known.

_She's long gone with her red shoes on._

They call her Captain 'Red Boots', which sounds silly until you're on the other end of her sword. Her boots are brown, but it's been years since anyone has known her real name and she's always ankle deep in blood now anyhow.

_That girl with the blue dress on_

He hasn't put two and two together yet when he sees a girl whose pink hair is just the right shade and skin is just the right paleness in a blue dress on a cliff overlooking the harbor. She turns and her eyes are brown and she has freckles and her mouth is all wrong and it isn't her. But still, his heart skips a beat.

_When I think on it now, sure, we had a good time._

"We did have fun, didn't we?" She says to her first mate.

Naruto smiles and nudges her shoulder with his as they stare out at the line between ocean and sky, just as the sun sets. "More than that. I'll never be able to thank you enough Sakura."

"I'll miss you," she says in the morning, when he disembarks onto the ship they'd stolen and she'd given to him as a boon.

_All your cities I will burn._

Sasuke only ever attacks villages in the north of the Caribbean. He doesn't want to make the mistake of accidentally pillaging someone who knows who he used to be.

_Oh, lord above, send down a dove with beak as sharp as razors._

She glares at the sky and really really wishes someone would strike her down because this? Meeting the love of her former life again for the first time in ten years while trying to plunder his ship (Which is nowhere near as awesome as her ship by the way) is so not how she'd always pictured it.

_Take this, my darling, for the damage I have done._

He breaks the silence first. "Here," he thrusts a medallion she'd thought had simply been stolen from her pocket into her hands. "I guess I don't need this anymore."

_You can't win a race with a cannonball._

"AH AH AH AH AH AH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

"…Where're they go-iiiiiing AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

_My dear, I wish you joy._

"'I wish you joy' she says," he mutters to himself angrily, "'All I've ever wanted was for you to be happy,' she says." A growl. "YEAH FUCKING RIGHT. YOU TRIED TO _STAB ME_."

_How a man of the sea became a man of the road_

'Tortuga is in the past', he tells himself when he wakes up alone with her ship vanished from the harbor and his ship empty except for several tied up crewmembers. The ocean isn't big enough for the two of them.

_I'm writing a letter that you'll never see._

Dear Sasuke,  
>I'm sorry I had to leave you but you know how it is. The sex was great by the way. I love-<p>

She scrunches up the note and decides it would be best if she said nothing.

_Little Miss Queen of Darkness_

Or so they've started calling her when he sets foot on a ship the next time.

_With dark and roving eyes_

He sees her for the first time in five years and she's gotten older, more wind-beaten and her boobs are definitely bigger.

_Some men like to hear the cannonballs roaring._

"I live for this shit!" Naruto shouts just after he's swung down from a rope and landed on the poop deck.

"You're back!" Sakura exclaims as her former first-mate takes his place at her back.

"Nothing like the smell of gunpowder in the morning." A deep breath through the nose. "More people pick fights with you than me."

_Ten thousand stood round me but I was alone._

"I knew I'd see you here."

Sakura looks up and cocks an eyebrow, challenging him. Sasuke smirks right back.

It's the last stand of the age of the pirates and the East India Company and he's looking at her like she matters more than that.

Then he's looking at her breasts like they matter more than that, which is more than a little frightening.

_It's hard dying, but it's harder being born._

As it turns out, the fairy tale isn't about Prince Sasuke of the streets who fell into dissolution and so, freedom. It isn't about the princess who came from rags and defied all expectations. It isn't about how much they loved each other either.

The story is about a blond man named Naruto with a smile like the sun, who jumped in front of the sharp _wrongandright_ end of a sword to protect the person who helped him grow up. It is about how his heart was locked away in a cursed chest.

It's about the day the freest of men became chained to the sea he'd run away to, like so many others before and after him.

It is about how he came to live forever.

_The only lonely place_

They go every year. They never see each other besides those 3 days that end era after era, during which they're apart. They spend a day preparing themselves, a day being with the immortal lad and a day recovering before returning to their lives.

The first year he doesn't come is the loneliest she's ever lived.

_Face the future and forget about the past._

Sakura never stops coming, she never stops loving, but she does move on. She gets a new first mate. And she's lovely, if a little silly looking with her men's clothes and thin arms and, more tenuous still, dreams. She falls in love and out of love and in love and out again and again.

She lives her life thinking he'd died.

Sasuke stops coming but he never stops keeping an ear out in port for dawn on the high seas in the form of windswept pink hair and unearthly eyes and boots sticky with vagrants' blood. He never stops thinking of the boy who saved her.

He doesn't quite start to live, but thinks that eventually, one day he'll learn to.

Naruto never stops returning. He watches Sakura age and die and thinks that Sasuke's life must have gone the same. Even after they're long gone, there are people left to return to the island. Sakura has a son, and he a daughter, and she a son and daughter after that.

And he loves them all the same.

But he loves the adventure of knowing them more.


End file.
